From the Green Velvet Couch |A Conversation with Anna-Vija McClain
What if the secret to building a thriving company had less to do with hustle and more to do with happiness? Anna-Vija McClain has built a business around exactly that idea, and her story is a powerful reminder that healthy leaders create a positive work culture.
On her podcast, From the Green Velvet Couch, Shelly sat down with Anna-Vija, the founder and CEO of a Nashville-based digital marketing and systems agency. Their conversation moved from ADHD and project management mindsets to toxic work histories, intentional hiring, and the bold decision to run a four-day work week. Throughout it all, one theme kept rising to the surface. You cannot separate the health of a company from the health of the people inside it.
Here are the moments worth holding onto.
The Power of a Project Manager Mindset
Anna-Vija opened the conversation with a simple but transformative idea. If something is going to happen more than once in your business, you should not be reinventing it from scratch every time. She built her entire company around what she calls a project manager mindset, the practice of templating, systemizing, and documenting workflows so that no one person becomes the bottleneck.
Her agency started as a marketing company, but during the pandemic, clients began asking for help with their own systems and operations. That demand grew into an entire revenue stream focused on workflow efficiency and scalability. The lesson she shares with other business owners is that being the only person who can do something in your business is not a badge of honor. It is a self-imposed limit, and it leads straight to burnout.
This is the kind of structural clarity Shelly often helps leaders build through her executive advising work for founders and CEOs, where the goal is sustainable performance rather than heroic effort.
When ADHD Becomes a Strength
Anna-Vija was recently diagnosed with adult ADHD, though she had been self-treating it for years. She and Shelly had a candid conversation about how the same traits that make entrepreneurs successful often become their biggest struggles. The ability to spin many plates and think quickly on your feet comes packaged with the tendency toward hyperfocus, rabbit holes, and time mismanagement.
Both women agreed on one practical hack that has changed their work lives: touch it one time. For people wired with ADHD, the temptation is to set something aside and circle back later. But that circle back rarely happens, or it costs more energy than handling the task immediately. Over the course of a year running a company, that small discipline can save hundreds of hours.
Hiring With Intention
One of the most honest moments in the conversation came when Anna-Vija described her early hiring mistakes. As a high-energy, dominant personality, she would walk into interviews and unintentionally take over the conversation. She would leave feeling great about the candidate, only to realize later that she had spent the whole hour selling her company instead of learning anything about the person.
Her solution was to remove herself from the early hiring process entirely. Her operations director now uses a structured workflow based on a book called The A Method for Hiring, which takes the emotional impact out of the equation and lets the team evaluate candidates on a level playing field. The result has been better fit, better retention, and a much healthier dynamic inside the company.
Shelly shared that she had walked through almost the exact same realization with her own team. Once she stepped out of the early interview process, her company began hiring people based on actual skill and fit rather than the warmth of a single conversation.
The deeper principle here is that intentional hiring requires self-awareness. You have to know what you bring to a room, what you tend to overlook, and where your blind spots live. That kind of insight is exactly what Shelly cultivates in her performance mentoring work with leaders and high-profile clients.
A Toxic Past That Became a Mission
Anna-Vija was remarkably open about why mental health is at the center of her company. She spent her teens and twenties working in restaurants and private country clubs, environments she described as deeply unhealthy for young women. By her late twenties, she was clinically depressed, having regular panic attacks, and at the lowest point she had ever been.
When she started her own company in 2014, she made a vow to herself. Her number one company value would be happiness, and it would never change. That single commitment has shaped every decision she has made since, from refusing to keep clients who treat her team poorly, to building a remote-first culture that respects people as adults capable of managing their own lives.
She trusts her team to work when and where they do their best work. She does not require permission slips for doctor appointments. She protects her people from the kinds of environments that nearly broke her, and in doing so, she has created a workplace where people genuinely thrive.
The Four-Day Work Week Experiment
In January, Anna-Vija’s company made the leap to a four-day work week. It took two and a half years of preparation, starting with no-call Fridays and no-call Wednesdays, before the team felt ready to fully restructure. Half the team takes Mondays off and half takes Fridays, so the company stays open all week without sacrificing anyone’s recovery time.
What Anna-Vija loves most is that the change was not handed down from the top. She brought the team into the conversation. Why are we doing this? How will we structure it? What does this extra day off mean for your life? The result is a workplace where people feel ownership over their own wellbeing, not just the work in front of them.
She acknowledged that some team members, including herself, still occasionally work on their day off. The difference is the expectation. Working that day is a choice driven by personal rhythm, not an obligation driven by guilt.
Trust, Transparency, and the Hard Conversations
One of the most striking parts of the episode came when Anna-Vija described how she handles employees who get recruited away with bigger offers. Instead of feeling betrayed or scrambling to counter, she sits down with them and asks honest questions. What does that new role actually look like? Does the salary account for the commute, the lost flexibility, the longer hours? Is that the career path you actually want?
Multiple team members have chosen to stay, not because she pressured them, but because the conversation helped them see what they already had. That kind of openness only works in a culture built on trust and transparency. Anna-Vija shares profit and loss highlights with her team quarterly. They know what she pays herself. They know where the company is winning and where it is losing. There are no secrets, because secrets corrode trust faster than almost anything else.
Her mentor, Hannah Paramore Breen, once gave her a piece of advice that has reshaped how she leads: everyone will leave you. Clients, team members, partners, even close collaborators. The healthiest thing a leader can do is accept that and stop holding on so tightly. When you let go of the expectation that people will stay forever, you free yourself to celebrate them while they are with you and support them when they move on.
Healthy Companies Start With Healthy People
Toward the end of the conversation, Shelly named the throughline that had been weaving through every story Anna-Vija shared. You cannot show up at work as a healthy employee if you are not first a healthy person. There is no version of yourself that gets left at the door.
That is why mental health, leadership, and culture are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation. A leader who is burned out will burn out their team. A leader who has done the inner work creates the conditions for everyone around them to do theirs.
Shelly added one of her favorite reminders. You cannot vacation burnout away. A week off is not a strategy. The only real solution is the one Anna-Vija has built her entire company around, which is investing in your own wellbeing the same way you invest in your business. This kind of sustainable, whole-person approach is at the heart of Shelly’s wellness consulting work for organizations and leadership teams, where culture change starts at the top and reaches every employee.
🎧 Join the Conversation
If this post sparked something in you, the full episode is waiting with even more warmth and thoughtful insight.
✨ Listen to the full conversation on the From the Green Velvet Couch podcast. Visit the Podcast page to discover more episodes focused on resilience, leadership wellbeing, and holistic wellness.
Let this be your invitation to slow down, breathe deeply, and step into a well-grounded life full of growth and intention.
